Tag Archives for United Kingdom

Hundreds of women in London with vagina piercings will be recorded as victims of potentially illegal female genital mutilation under new NHS rules to be introduced next month.

The mandatory reporting regulations, sent to medical staff by the Department of Health, say that any woman whose labia or clitoris has been pierced must be classed as suffering FGM.

The rules will apply even when women have consented to the piercing and had the procedure in the belief that it will improve their sex lives and enhance their attractiveness.

It means that each of the women will also be classed as a potential crime victim and that those responsible for carrying out the piercing could be deemed guilty of an offence under legislation banning FGM.

Pesky potholes have been known to stick around for years in some cities before crews are finally sent to repair them. Obscene graffiti, on the other hand, will often disappear as quickly as someone can phone in a complaint.

With this in mind, an anonymous U.K. artist who goes by the handle Wanksy began spray painting giant penis shapes around the potholes in his Greater Manchester town.

His goal? To attract the attention of local council and get the potholes fixed.

[…]

It appears as though his efforts are paying off.

The Evening News reports that within 48 hours of Wanksy’s first tagging session at the beginning of April, “many of the potholes” he’d drawn around the town of Bury had been filled.

Pupils at North Primary School in London, England, had made pinhole cameras to watch the recent solar eclipse. But school officials at the last minute forced them to watch the event on television, saying some religions object to directly watching an eclipse. When pressed by local media to say exactly which religions would object, school officials refused to answer.

And Dorset police said this had happened to six of the seized devices it had in custody, within one year.

The technology used was designed to allow owners to remove sensitive data from their phones if they are stolen.

“If a device has a signal, in theory it is possible to wipe it remotely,” said Ken Munro, a digital forensics expert with Pen Test Partners.

A spokeswoman for Dorset police told the BBC: “There were six incidents, but we don’t know how people wiped them.

“We have cases where phones get seized, and they are not necessarily taken from an arrested person – but we don’t know the details of these cases as there is not a reason to keep records of this,” she added.

A spokeswoman for Derbyshire police confirmed that the force had had one incident of a device being remotely wiped while in police custody.

“We can’t share many details about it, but the case concerned romance fraud, and a phone involved with the investigation was remotely wiped,” she said.

“It did not impact upon the investigation, and we went on to secure a conviction,” she added.

Meanwhile Cleveland police told the BBC that it too had had a case of a phone that had been wiped but it was not clear “whether it was wiped prior to coming into police hands”.

Asked whether the police felt that the issue had damaged their investigation, the spokeswoman said: “We don’t know because we don’t know what was on the phone.”

Other police forces affected by the issue include:

Cambridgeshire – one incident between August 2013 and August 2014

Durham – one incident during the same period

Nottingham – one incident

Mr Munro, who analyses hundreds of laptops, tablets, phones and other devices for corporate clients, said: “When we seize a device for digital forensics, we put it immediately into a radio-frequency shielded bag, which prevents any signals from getting through.

“If we can’t get to the scene within an hour, we tell the client to pop it in a microwave oven.

“The microwave is reasonably effective as a shield against mobile or tablet signals – just don’t turn it on.”

SecureDrives, which develops hard drives for the military, is releasing one next year that can be physically destroyed just by sending a text message.

The hard drive -which will cost more than £1,000 – is also immune to the radio-frequency blocking bags.

“The hard drive is constantly looking for GSM [Global System for Mobile Communications] signals, if it is starved of them it it would destroy itself. It would see such a bag as a threat,” said James Little, head of sales at SecureDrives.

Lord Best has called for those who use social networking sites, such as Twitter, to be put on a special ‘register’ so that the police can put them away – probably for many decades – if they commit any thought crimes. This is under the pretext of catching people who send ‘revenge porn’ which there was absolutely no reason to criminalise in the first place anyway. However, this new legislation goes further as it removes anonymity from the internet and will inevitably lead to criminalising things such as the ‘thought crime’ of informing the general public as to the barbarity and sheer evilness of the Sex Offender Register. As those who speak out will be automatically caught and arrested due to their names all being ‘on a register’ it will allow the government to secretly and covertly incarcerate millions of people in gulags where they are warehoused like battery farmed chickens…